09 February 2012

Book review: Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck

Implementation Patterns is a book of 2007, written by Kent Beck - software consultant, one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, and author of, among other things, JUnit, Extreme Programming Explained, TDD By Example.

Implementation Patterns is basically a collection of coding-level patterns, whose purpose is to address values defined in the initial theory of programming: communication (readability), simplicity, and flexibility.

These patterns are described with usual Beck's clear and straightforward style, and are common-sense recipes that every professional should know and recognize themselves. From this point of view, so, this is not an indispensable book: given a bit of common sens, its content is almost trivial, but... there are so many developers without common sense, out there... that such a book, and books like this, like the ultra famousClean Code by Uncle Bob, are sadly necessary...

I think this is a book every developer should read: even if only for recognize behaviors that already adopts in everiday coding, and that the boss or the management consider just academical...

Uh, and: very interesting the chapter about applying implementation patterns to design-framework-for-evolution...